Wordpress themes, plugins and tips

Social networks are very important nowadays if we think about a good marketing strategy. It is necessary to connect your visitors in social networks. They read one of your posts and they like it, most of them are too lazy to use a RSS reader or e-mail, but there is something that they are not lazy to do: talk and share stuff on social networking sites. If you give them the option to connect with you trough one of their favorite networks they will respond very well, They like what you write so they won’t mean if they have to click a button to get your articles closer to it’s environment: the social network.

Social bookmarking sites are a little different than social netwoking, they are focused on sharing links with their friends, while social networks can do many other things and link sharing is only a part of it.

In both cases, you would like your visitors to share what they like with their networks. If they like your post, they will want to share it, but if they find it is so hard to do it they won’t. Well, give them the opportunity to share your posts.

I will start testing some social bookmarking plugins and i will share my experience.

1. Sociable

Sociable works with almost all social networks and bookmarking sites, there are 99 in total that sociable can work with. Altought many users will use only the top 5 or top 10, it is a good thing to provide support for most of them, some users in different niches can find them very useful.

The sociable plugin has the option to select on which pages you want to show the icons for social bookmarks. By default, the social bookmarking buttons are shown on single post pages and single pages, but you can add it to your blog homepage, to archives pages, tag pages, search result pages and RSS items.

Another good feature is that you can select if you want to show icons or text links, along with the option to make the social bookmarking site to open in a new window, or as an iframe to the current one.

If you want to not scarry people with your URL, the sociable plugin have the option to shorten the URL with awe.sm system.

The plugin is awesome, the icons are shaded and they are highlighted on mouse over, that will give a good aspect to your blog. The greatest thing is the ability to open the social bookmarking site in a thickbox inside the main window.

2. Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Add to any has more sites than Sociable, this maybe because it includes e-mail buttons, so you click it and a the selected email website will open with message ready to be sent.

It has also options to display the share button on pages, posts, home page and feed.

The difference between this and Sociable is that sociable list all links or images, but AddtoAny shows a button that on mouse over a small pop-up opens with all selected social bookmarking sites. That button image can be changed or can be made single text. It provides the option to open the pop-up when the user go with the mouse over the button or when the user click on it.

Actually i would prefer to have all social bookmarking sites listed so the user can see his favourite and share. If he see a share button he can’t figure out at the first sight what is it about.

3. I love social bookmarking

This plugin has only few bookmarking websites. I couldn’t find twitter, well, that must be a problem now. The setting options allows you to customize the style of icons that appear.

You can select where to display icons, single post, homepage, single pages, archives, tags, etc.

[…] many times you wanted to start your own Digg ? In case you don’t know digg is a social bookmarking website: Stories are submitted and others vote for stories they like. When a story reach a number […]

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Welcome to Flame Scorpion !

I'm Lucian Apostol and i'm a web developer and internet marketer, trying to make the web a better place. For more details check my linkedin profile .